Unity (NYSE: U) is the world’s leading platform for creating and operating real-time 3D content. Creators—ranging from game developers to artists, architects, automotive designers, filmmakers, and more—use Unity to design, run, and monetize interactive content for mobile phones, tablets, PCs, consoles, and augmented and virtual reality devices. In 2020, 71% of the top mobile games were made with Unity, and apps developed by Unity creators were downloaded more than five billion times per month.

“Talent acquisition has even more credibility now because recruiters are no longer speaking anecdotally; they’re speaking with data.”

Emily Russell

Senior Global Data Analyst for Recruiting

Context

As a hyper-growth business, the organization’s focus was on scaling their teams to meet their customers’ needs. The executive team was keen to see not only how Talent Acquisition was impacting their business, but also to understand how they could further improve hiring outcomes. Senior leaders were looking for insights that validated their current TA strategy while uncovering opportunities for growth. “It was difficult to drive a validated strategy without extensive data into our hiring process,” says Amber Hayes, who was brought on as VP of Global Recruiting for Unity’s 100+ person recruiting team in 2019. “And difficult, by extension, to offer insights into what the team needed to be successful based on where the business was headed,” adds Emily Russell, Senior Global Data Analyst for Recruiting. That’s when Unity’s TA team embarked on a journey to elevate their reporting capabilities and optimize their recruiting strategy with the help of Talent Compass, Gem’s insights & planning studio.

Delivering Executive-Level Insights

The first step was to illustrate how Unity’s TA team was impacting the business. Amber tracks key metrics on a month-to-month basis and shares them with leaders up to Unity’s C-suite, offering transparency and building trust. Talent Compass dashboards give her all the visuals she needs to show leaders how the team is tracking against goals and KPIs. Meanwhile, Corin, Global Recruiting Programs Manager at Unity, notes that Talent Compass’ forecasting calculator has been particularly valuable for setting expectations. Unity’s TA team can project how many hires they can expect from their current pipeline. “A recruiter can look at the forecast and say, based on historical numbers, if we want to fill the role in this number of days, here’s what our pipeline should look like,” Amber says. “But if we give it another week, here’s how that additional time will allow us to impact the makeup of the pipeline.”

“Talent acquisition has even more credibility now because recruiters are no longer speaking anecdotally; they’re speaking with data. So they can facilitate productive conversations with functional partners and influence upper management in ways they may not have been able to before.” For example, Emily recalls, “for a few months this year, the reports I was pulling showed that our dedicated sourcers weren’t really producing hires. This led our VP to ask: Is this a worthy investment? Do we need to divest in sourcing, or invest in more recruiters? So business decisions are being made based on Gem’s data. It’s amazing to be impacting executive decisions. And even as a data analyst, I’m grateful for the ease of reporting with Gem.”

Using Data to Operate Efficiently

Gem also helps grease the wheels of recruiting workflows. For example, recruiters and sourcers now have visibility into the strategies that work when it comes to building top-of-funnel pipelines. “It’s incredible to have hard data behind the fact that follow-ups get results. You can go into someone’s outreach in Gem and see that. And when you have data like that—not to mention the automated follow-ups themselves—you necessarily have performance optimization.” Emily adds that she trains new recruiters on Gem’s Outreach Stats right away. “They can see exactly how many messages they’ve sent, what their open and response rates look like, what percentage of their outreach is to female talent or underrepresented talent. These are SLAs we hold recruiters to. So to be able to track prospective candidates’ behavior is remarkably insightful. What content resonates for talent; what’s making them click? Recruiters are meeting their SLAs because they have access to precisely the data that helps them do so.”

Those insights also carry into the rest of the recruiting funnel. Gem pulls data from Unity’s ATS so the team can track their efforts across the entire candidate journey, from initial outreach to hire. “I can send bird’s-eye views of their entire pipelines in a single email,” says Corin. Having the entire funnel in one view, Amber says, allows the team to identify trends. “You can observe variance. If the numbers are higher in some places and for some roles, or some hiring managers, or some demographics, what did we do right there? If they’re lower, what aren’t we doing? Metrics equal opportunities to pivot and optimize. They also ultimately make the team more conscious in their approach. Data ingrains a kind of mindfulness.” 

The ease of access and visibility, Emily adds, has led “to a self-service mindset and keeps hiring managers actively engaged. Passthrough rates are invaluable to bring to the conversation. And if we're seeing that people are rejecting us at certain stages, that’s something to look into. What’s the hiring manager saying during phone screens? Are we losing people after discussing salary expectations? Leaders can take these findings back to the day-to-day management of their requisitions.”

Conclusion

“As a leader for TA, Gem [Talent Compass] answers some fundamental but crucial questions about our hiring funnel that I wouldn’t otherwise have visibility into,” says Amber. “What does team activity look like? What are our best sources of hire? What do passthrough rates look like at every stage of the hiring funnel, for every role? Gem gives us historical data to work with.” Understanding what their baseline metrics were and then being able to identify opportunities to optimize is what Emily says drove a 10-day drop in Unity’s time to fill. “Last year our average time-to-fill was 75 days. We set a goal for 70 days in 2020; and we've been at 65 or lower all year.”